“Ouf!” interrupted Cigarette, before his phrase was one-third finished.  “The stalled mare will not go with the wild coursers; an aristocrat may live with us, but he will always cling to his old order.  This is the story that runs with the roses.  Milady was languidly insolent over some ivory chessmen, and Corporal Victor thought it divine, because languor and insolence are the twin gods of the noblesse, parbleu!  Milady, knowing no gods but those two, worships them, and sends to the soldiers of France, as the sort of sacrifice her gods love, fruits, and wines that, day after day, are set on her table, to be touched, if tasted at all, with a butterfly’s sip; and Corporal Victor finds this a charity sublime—­to give what costs nothing, and scatter a few crumbs out from the profusion of a life of waste and indulgence!  And I say that, if my children are of my fashion of thinking, they will choke like dogs dying of thirst rather than slake their throats with alms cast to them as if they were beggars!”

With which fiery and bitter enunciation of her views on the gifts of the Princesse Corona d’Amague, Cigarette struck light to her brule-guele, and thrusting it between her lips, with her hands in the folds of her scarlet waist-sash, went off with the light, swift step natural to her, exaggerated into the carriage she had learned of the Zouaves; laughing her good-morrows noisily to this and that trooper as she passed their couches, and not dropping her voice even as she passed the place where the dead lay, but singing, as loud as she could, the most impudent drinking-song out of the taverns of the Spahis that ever celebrated wine, women, and war in the lawlessness of the lingua Sabir.

Her wrath was hot, and her heart heavy within her.  She had given up her whole fete-day to wait on the anguish and to soothe the solitude of his friend lying dying there; and her reward had been to hear him speak of this aristocrat’s donations, that cost her nothing but the trouble of a few words of command to her household, as though they were the saintly charities of some angel from heaven!

“Diantre!” she muttered, as her hand wandered to the ever-beloved forms of the pistols within her sash.  “Any of them would throw a draught of wine in his face, and lay him dead for me with a pass or two ten minutes after.  Why don’t I bid them?  I have a mind——­”

In that moment she could have shot him dead herself without a moment’s thought.  Storm and sunlight swept, one after another, with electrical rapidity at all times, through her vivid, changeful temper; and here she had been wounded and been stung in the very hour in which she had subdued her national love of mirth, and her childlike passion for show, and her impatience of all confinement, and her hatred of all things mournful, in the attainment of this self-negation!  Moreover, there mingled with it the fierce and intolerant heat of the passionate and scarce-conscious jealousy of an utterly untamed nature, and of Gallic blood, quick and hot as the steaming springs of the Geyser.